Amritsar 1919

by Kim Wagner

  Sundar Singh was the first to be fastened to the flogging post (Tiktiki) and given 30 stripes. He became senseless after the 4th stripe, but when some water was poured into his mouth by a soldier, he regained consciousness; he was again subjected to flogging. He lost his consciousness for the second time, but the flogging never ceased till he was given thirty stripes. He was taken off the flogging post, bleeding and quite unconscious. Mela was the second to be tied to the post. He too became unconscious after receiving four of five stripes. He was given some water, and the flogging continued. Magtu was the third victim. He too got thirty stripes. While Mangtu was being flogged, I cried bitterly and I could bear the sight no longer [. . .] I saw the six boys who had just received flogging, bleeding badly. They were all handcuffed, and, as they could not walk even a few paces, they were dragged away by the Police. They were taken to the Fort.103

  Another man had to watch how his son ‘shrieked with pain’, while the sister-in-law of one of the others described herself crying ‘while the soldiers were laughing’.104 The women who remained inside their houses tried to comfort their children as the screams of the young men reached them, including one particularly heart-rendering plea: ‘Oh mother, I am dead. Oh Sahib, leave me.’105 None of the six men had actually been tried for, let alone found guilty of, the attack on Miss Sherwood, but that was of little consequence to Dyer:

  The chances were from what I had heard and been told that these were the particular men. If they were not the particular men and another man was beaten, still it did not matter very much whether he was beaten there or somewhere else, if he was convicted. I did not wish to run the risk, if he had committed the offence against Miss Sherwood, of his being beaten somewhere else; therefore when I heard that these were the men, I had them beaten in the same street.106

  These were the exact sentiments expressed by one of Orwell’s characters in Burmese Days, in referring to punishing the murderer of a white man: ‘They won’t go free, don’t you fear. We’ll get ’em. Get somebody, anyhow. Much better hang wrong fellow than no fellow.’107 During moments of crisis, the guilt of the individual was more or less irrelevant to the real purpose of the spectacle of punishment: the performance of pure colonial power.

  One month later, the six boys, along with two others, were found guilty of the attack on Miss Sherwood before a martial law tribunal. Seven were given the death penalty, and the youngest, who was just thirteen years old, was given transportation for life. They all denied having had anything to do with the attack on 10 April but were convicted based on the testimony of witnesses brought forward by the police only after the flogging on 20 April. The accounts of the defence witnesses, which suggested that some of the men had not even been in Amritsar at the time of the attack, were simply dismissed. The sentences were later commuted by the Government: two were given transportation for life, five received prison sentences ranging between one and seven years, and the youngest was eventually released.108 The bizarre logic of colonial justice during martial law meant that people summarily punished for a crime they had not been convicted of were subsequently considered guilty of that crime by virtue of having already been punished. Once the young men had been flogged for the attack on Miss Sherwood in Kucha Kaurianwala, their conviction for that crime thus became more or less inevitable. This was a notion of ‘justice’ and ‘punishment’ so abstract as to be virtually meaningless, but the result of the perceived necessity for the British to restore the prestige of the Raj at all costs.

  When O’Dwyer learned of the crawling order, he immediately ordered Dyer to put a stop to it, and on 24 April, after a six-day reign of ritualised abuse and racialised humiliation, the flogging post was removed and the soldiers finally left Kucha Kaurianwala.109 The memories of the experience, however, stayed with the residents. As Lab Chand Seth described: ‘up to this day, a kind of terror overcame everyone in the neighbourhood when passing by the place where the flogging post or tiktiki had been erected’. This was, of course, exactly what was intended by the crawling order and public whipping. It was not just the experience itself, however, that left a lasting memory. One of the residents of the street recalled that the British soldiers had taken photographs of themselves while enforcing the crawling order.110 These photographs actually survived and today provide one of the few visual sources for the events at Amritsar in April 1919. Sergeant R.M. Howgego, of the 25th London Cyclists, took a number of snapshots while on duty in Amritsar, mostly of the troops resting in their temporary camp in Ram Bagh, on picket duty outside the ruins of the National Bank, or, in one instance, guarding a wounded prisoner outside the tennis court of the club. There are, however, four photos taken at Kucha Kaurianwala between 19 and 24 April.111

  One photo shows one of Howgego’s friends posing next to the empty flogging post, from which the shackles can clearly be seen, just across from the small alley-way known as Kucha Kurrichhan. There are also two images of the soldiers actually enforcing the crawling order. One is taken from further down the alley, with two of the men in their iconic pith helmets and an Indian man on the ground between them. The two soldiers have their rifles slung over the shoulder, and one of them appears to be prodding the prostrate man with a stick. The other photo, which is quite well known, shows five of the soldiers, including a small dog, standing around an Indian man, who appears to be the same as in the previous image. Two of the soldiers have their bayoneted rifles levelled at the man on the ground, who is lifting his head, looking at the camera. The inscription in pencil on the back of the photographs is entirely innocuous: ‘Making a native crawl through the street as punishment. Amritsar City’ – or simply ‘Punishment, Amritsar City’.112 For these troops, the experience of being deployed in Amritsar provided a welcome distraction from the tedium of barrack life, and not that unlike visits to various tourist sites in India, where they also took snapshots as souvenirs. The final image is a group shot of the eight men of Howgego’s picket sitting on the steps of what is most likely Lab Chand Seth’s ground-floor shop in Kucha Kaurianwala. Although they are all wearing shorts and thin shirts with rolled-up sleeves, it is obvious that it is unbearably hot. They have taken off their helmets, two of which can be seen on their laps, but are otherwise wearing full equipment with extra bandoliers and their bayoneted rifles in hand. What is most noticeable about the photograph, however, is how happy and relaxed they seem and one of them even has a big smile on his face.

  The British authorities were meanwhile struggling to find the evidence of the rebellious conspiracy that they were convinced had been the cause of the unrest. Even with the severely reduced requirements for evidence, the Martial Law Commission needed something more substantial and, in the absence of tangible proof, the testimony of an informant would do. Seth Gul Mahammad, the young son of a glassware merchant, had helped Hans Raj prepare the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April and later escaped during the firing. Early next morning, on 14 April, Hans Raj had stopped briefly by the glassware shop and warned him, as Mahammad described: ‘the police were after him and that he would be arrested. He asked me to be careful as the police might arrest me also.’113 Nothing further happened, but a week later Mahammad was arrested by the police during prayer at the mosque in Hall Bazaar and taken to the kotwali. Here, he, like so many others, was interrogated by Jowahar Lal of the CID:

  He asked me to state that Drs Satyapal and Kitchlew had instigated me to bring about the Hartal on the 6th, that they had encouraged me by saying that they would use bombs to drive out the English from the Country. I refused to make a statement, containing such falsehoods. Jowahar Lal then asked his underlings to take me aside and to make me ‘alright’. I was then taken a few paces from Jowahar Lal’s office table and asked by a number of Constables to please Jowahar Lal by doing what he wanted me to do. I still refused. They then caught hold of my hands and placed it under the leg of a cot, over which seven or eight constables were sitting. When the pain became unbearable I cried out, ‘Leave my hand I will do whatever you a
sk me to do.’

  Mahammad nevertheless refused to implicate Kitchlew and Satyapal, and over the duration of the next ten days he was repeatedly beaten, slapped and caned, and threatened in various ways. During the prolonged beatings at the kotwali, Mahammad suddenly realised that Hans Raj was there too – not as a prisoner, but apparently working with the police, and encouraging his friend to do as they asked. ‘I found him quite jolly and comfortable,’ Mahammad recalled, ‘He laughed when the policemen tortured me.’114

  When the firing began at Jallianwala Bagh, Hans Raj had thrown himself on the ground and thus survived unscathed. He then fled, asking a friend he met on the street to let his mother know that he was safe.115 On 16 April, Hans Raj was arrested and was first taken to the fort along with a number of other prisoners. Four days later he was brought to the kotwali where Jowahar Lal was in charge of the investigation into what became known as the Amritsar Conspiracy Case. Jowahar Lal claimed that Hans Raj was immediately brought before a magistrate, A. Seymour, to whom he made a two-day long statement.116 It later emerged that Jowahar Lal had ‘questioned’ Hans Raj before the recorded statement was made, and on 24 April Hans Raj was offered a pardon in return for providing evidence against his former ‘accomplices’ and thus became what was known as an ‘approver’.117

  In colonial India, the use of approvers, or ‘King’s Evidence’, had a long and legally established history, and most famously was used as part of the suppression of highway robbers known as ‘Thugs’ during the 1830s.118 An approver was a suspect who was granted a pardon in return for providing evidence and identifying, or approving, the names of his associates. In the absence of conclusive evidence, the testimony of the approver was thus generally considered sufficient proof to obtain convictions. No evidence of a conspiracy at Amritsar ever emerged, and so instead the authorities had to rely on Hans Raj to implicate the local leaders and attribute to them the violence of 10 April. As the joint secretary of the Satyagraha Sabha, Hans Raj knew who had signed the Satyagraha pledge, and he had furthermore been present at many of the meetings and had himself taken an active part in organising and announcing several of the hartals.

  While the circumstances under which Hans Raj was persuaded to become an approver remain unknown, it would seem highly likely that the decision was anything but voluntary – especially when considering Jowahar Lal’s use of threats and torture in other cases.119 Despite the policeman’s claims to the contrary, Hans Raj had in fact been carefully coached before his statement to Magistrate Seymour, and the opening line of his confession was indeed conspicuous for what it explicitly denied: ‘I see that no one is present in this room except myself and the Magistrate recording my statement. No promise or threat has been made to me, and I make this statement of my own free will and accord. I am not handcuffed. I am Joint Secretary of the Satyagraha Sabha at Amritsar.’120 What followed was a day-by-day account of the activities of the anti-Rowlatt protests at Amritsar, beginning with the hartal on 30 March. Through his testimony, Hans Raj produced a logical narrative of meetings and riots that apportioned blame to individuals in a highly instrumental manner. During the investigation, and subsequent trial, it was accordingly also Hans Raj, rather than Kitchlew and Satyapal or any of the other leaders, who came to tell the story of the anti-Rowlatt protests and the Satyagraha movement at Amritsar.121 The role of Hans Raj in shaping the official understanding of the unrest thus went far beyond his role as a stoolpigeon. Hans Raj soon became integral to the effort to implicate as many of the local nationalists and Satyagraha volunteers as possible, first identifying people and subsequently coaching their confessions. The 13-year-old boy, who had been proclaiming the meeting on 13 April, for instance, was arrested and taken to the kotwali, as he later described:

  I was kept confined in the verandah next to the Kotwali, and was never allowed to answer even calls of nature without being attended by a constable. I was made to sleep on the bare floor; and occasionally, I used to be beaten and caned by constables. After two days, I was made over to Hans Raj who used to be in the Kotwali. Hans Raj wanted me to make a false statement which at first, I refused. Then afterwards, when I could not bear it any longer I made a statement to Inspector Jowahar according to the way Hans Raj taught me.122

  The boy thus ended up testifying to the presence of particular individuals at the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April, which was quite enough to have them arrested and put before the Martial Law Commission. Hans Raj was also used to implicate others who were already in custody, thereby retrospectively justifying the ‘investigation’ of the police.123

  The real test for Hans Raj came when he had to provide evidence in the Amritsar Conspiracy Case at Lahore. During the trial before the Martial Law Commission, which began on 9 June 1919, Hans Raj was brought in as Prosecution Witness No. 1, and he had to carefully repeat his entire account, including a description of the specific acts and utterances of the fifteen men accused, including Kitchlew, Satyapal and Bashir. While the narrative was broadly in line with what he had told Seymour a month and a half before, Hans Raj adjusted his story ever so slightly on a number of points. When he described the moment when Satyapal received the letter summoning him to Irving’s house in the morning of 10 April, for instance, the approver claimed that: ‘Both he and Kitchlew told me that if by any means they were deported it would be the duty of us to take revenge.’124 Hans Raj had not mentioned this in his first deposition before Seymour and it appears to have been a later addition to strengthen the case against the two leaders as somehow responsible for the riots that ensued following their deportation. It was also an entirely implausible claim since neither Kitchlew nor Satyapal knew or even suspected that they were about to be deported.125 Ultimately, the judge did not consider the approver’s claim to be plausible, yet his testimony still formed the basis of the conviction of the fifteen men. Kitchlew, Satyapal and Bashir were found guilty of conspiring and abetting the ‘waging of war against the King’ and for being members of a conspiracy ‘in the pursuit of the common object of which sedition was uttered, dacoity with murder, riot, arson, murder, grievous hurt, intimidation and mischief were committed’.126 Kitchlew and Satyapal were both sentenced to transportation for life, which was commuted to two years’ rigorous imprisonment, while Bashir was first sentenced to death but later given six years’ rigorous imprisonment.127

  The nature of the ‘evidence’ in many of these cases was blatantly obvious to the British officers and officials who administered the martial law courts, and the trial records were replete with references to police coercion and retracted testimonies. In the National Bank Case, for instance, a man named Faqir, who confessed to having stabbed Stewart, stated that ‘My confession implicates others but these names were given by me at Police investigation and under pressure.’128 Two of the other accused in the same case made similar statements before the British members of the Martial Law Commission. Manohar Singh’s statement was in that regard fairly typical: ‘I am implicated by the Police because I refused to give evidence. My confession was extorted by the Police through torture.’129 The judges, however, tended to ignore any but the most grievous examples of manipulation of witness testimonies and, of the twenty-one suspects arraigned in the National Bank Case, all but one were subsequently sentenced to death.130 When the Government of India subsequently reviewed the judgements for capital crimes, however, they commuted most of the sentences: a total of 152 prisoners were tried by the Martial Law Commission for crimes committed in Amritsar on 10 April, and of the 51 death sentences passed, 11 were ultimately carried out.131

  The Indian leaders who were on the receiving end of the martial law prosecutions, were, as might be expected, scathing in their criticism. ‘The trial was a huge farce,’ according to Kitchlew:

  The attitude of the presiding Judge was obviously hostile to the accused persons. Prosecution witnesses who deposed in our favour were bullied by the court. Our counsel were often told that they were allowed to appear for the defence only as a
matter of courtesy, otherwise they had no right to be there. They were treated not only with scant courtesy but were not even allowed to cross-examine prosecution witnesses at length. Even answers given by prosecution witnesses were not recorded fully. The defence witnesses were maltreated by the Police as well as by the presiding Judge. In short, Mr. Broadway behaved not as a Judge but as a prosecutor.132

  Dr Bashir, who was originally sentenced to death, later wrote a letter in the Bombay Chronicle, in which he was particularly disparaging of the reliance on Hans Raj to secure the sentences in the Amritsar Conspiracy Case:

  To believe a dismissed ticket-collector, specially when he is removed from service on account of tampering with cash and who is in very straitened circumstances, eager to get even a low job in the police department and to base conviction on such an unreliable evidence could be possible only in Martial Law days. Even now he is in the employment of the Government, a reward merited out to him for his fabricated and false evidence involving many respectable and innocent people. I was condemned to the gallows on the evidence of this absolutely demoralised creation [. . .] On a solitary statement of a hopelessly false witness I was sentenced to death, the extreme penalty provided by Law.133

  Hans Raj was later suspected of having worked for the police all along as an agent provocateur, but the fact that he was himself in the crowd when the firing started at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April, and subsequently went into hiding from the police, suggests otherwise.134 Throughout his young life, Hans Raj had struggled to make a living by whatever means necessary. He originally joined the Satyagraha protests without much conviction and later rose through the ranks by default. After the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, he did what he could to save his own skin, and he apparently did so with little compunction. Hans Raj was not a traitor to the nationalist cause as much as a simple opportunist, and it was entirely by chance that this hapless individual ended up playing such a central role in the events of April 1919. Selling out his comrades to save himself, however, made him a marked man and while the trials were still ongoing in early May his family’s house in Amritsar was burned down.135 Hans Raj had, in the words of Edmund Candler, become a ‘pariah of fortune’, and whatever happened after he had fulfilled his role as an approver remains unknown.136 Rup Lal Puri, the secretary of the local Congress Committee, simply noted that ‘he disappeared soon after the Martial Law trial was over and has not been heard of since then. He was a man of no character.’137